The Hemp Connection:
self-esteem

Last night, I came across a post by Kate Harding* on her Shapely Prose blog that made me stop and really think for a bit about my own hard-wired reactions to compliments from people. Once in a while, I see, read, or hear something that makes a lasting impact and changes the way I live my life, moving forward from that point. Reading Kate's blog last night had that kind of impact on the way I accept a compliment from now on.

In the blog post in question, here, Kate points out how rarely we accept a compliment and just say,"Yeah, I'm pretty awesome." or"I worked hard for that!" or"I'm good at it!" or simply,"Thank you! I agree!"

We always find a way to downplay ourselves, saying how someone else is better, or how we could have done better, or how the person giving the compliment is crazy. But we never really take credit for whatever it is that the compliment is given. She makes a really good point about how we are programmed to think that if a woman acknowledges she is good at something, she is self-centered, egotistical, narcissistic, etc. Even if we just told her how great she is at xyz! If she says,"I know! Thanks!" Our gut reaction is commonly to think,"Wow, what a self-absorbed b*tch! Who does she think she is?!" And think about it. How many times have you received a compliment, where you know the person giving it is totally right. You gave a great presentation, you baked a phenomenal batch of oatmeal cookies, you sang an amazing rendition of Black Velvet at karaoke — whatever. And you knew it. Instead you guarded yourself and deflected the compliment so they wouldn't think you were stuck up. Right? Right? I know you did.

We're just used to that. Or maybe it's me. But I have a feeling it's not just me.

The comments from readers are priceless, and really take this from being just another blog post, to a great big celebration of our collective awesomeness. She encouraged her readers to post why they rock, and every time I finished reading a comment, I thought,"HECK YEAH!" I went in there and added a comment myself — and could have kept going!

I encourage every woman reading this blog post to read that blog post. And even if you don't add to the comments, take some time to think about all the things you're great at, all the things you've worked hard to accomplish, all the big and small things you dominate every day, all the things you know you totally own. And then go ahead and from today, going forward, give yourself permission to unapologetically take full credit for it and tell yourself out loud how awesome you are.

* Kate Harding is the co-author of Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body (with Marian Kirby who blogs at The Rotund). She is also a contributor on Salon.com's Broadsheet. Her writing mostly covers size acceptance and feminist issues with other things here and there.

inCYSTer Ivonne Ward tweeted this yesterday. Apparently FOX and ABC declined to air the lingerie ad posted below.

Do these networks just not understand just how many of you (practically everyone reading this blog) they offend with such a decision?

You've got a couple of choices you can make. You can let them know what you think. You can flip the channel. Even if it means missing the final episodes of Dancing With The Stars and American Idol.

I certainly hope you patronize Lane Bryant. They are advocating for you. And they clearly believe that all of you are beautiful.: )

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMxyZQfMmM4

Source: iwishihadanocean.tumblr.com via Christine on Pinterest

In my psychotherapy practice, I hear comments like these every day. Many of my clients have low self-esteem, and run a constant stream of mental verbal abuse. It may stem from an abusive background (the things their parents said to them are embedded at this point), frustrating health conditions that are difficult to manage, or having a tendency to find unhealthy relationships. Not knowing how to create change is another reason for this kind of self-talk. Lots of things can trigger self-abuse, and it usually doesn’t take much. Many of us are all too good at starting the litany of self-abuse. For some of us, it’s a 24 hour a day practice.

What is the result of this constant barrage of mean, unproductive, and even cruel commentary? Feeling bad goes to feeling worse, depression is exacerbated, motivation decreases, and sometimes an eating, drinking, spending, or sexual binge is set off because a woman feels and thinks, “What’s the point? I can’t change. This is too hard. I’ll never figure it out. This isn’t worth it. I’m not worth it.”

I want you to stop beating yourself up – NOW. There are enough negatives coming in from external sources (bad grades, an unappreciative spouse, kids who walk all over you, the competitive types at the gym who sneer at your efforts, the not-so-subtle one-upmanship of your friend who has a much larger clothing budget, etc.). You need to combat all of that with positive self-talk, and a commitment to deleting the negative statements from your vocabulary. Every time you start with the negative self-talk, write it down, and immediately counter it in writing with a positive statement. For example:

• “I look like crap” becomes “I have some extra weight because of my PCOS, but I’ve made huge improvements in my diet and exercise program – and I’m getting there. And I still dress really cute. That matters.”

• “I’m stupid” is countered with “I’m smart, and there’s lots of evidence to prove it – I had a 3.9 GPA, and three people (name them) told me I was smart in the last month.”

• “I don’t know how to be happy” gets countered with “happiness is a process, and I’m taking important steps to achieve it, like journaling, going to therapy, and keeping a gratitude list.”

Your language is powerful, and it’s a choice. It impacts your sense of well-being, productivity, and even your health. By choosing positive language for your self-talk, it also shifts your interactions with other people. More importantly, it shifts your sense of self, and improves your self-esteem. Only you have the power to do that.

Gretchen Kubacky, Psy.D. is a Health Psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles, California. She has completed the inCYST training. She specializes in counseling women and couples who are coping with infertility, PCOS, and related endocrine disorders and chronic illnesses.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. HOUSE or her practice, or obtain referrals in the Los Angeles area, please visit her website at www.drhousemd.com, or e-mail her at AskDrHouseMD@gmail.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @askdrhousemd.

I’ve been having an interesting conversation on Twitter with a woman who advocates for size acceptance.

I shared with her that I believe in size acceptance, but that my experience in over 30 years of being a dietitian has been that it hasn’t seemed to help progress the movement to confront it directly. In fact, many popular women’s magazines I’ve seen, tend to politely give lip service to the idea by putting an article in about the topic. At which point, I see it posted by the author on Facebook, all of that person’s friends “like” the post, they get a moment of fame for the piece, and traffic is driven to the magazine’s website. Where everywhere you look there are advertisements and other articles with messages running completely counter to the well-intended message in the “healthy” article.

The magazines don’t care what’s in the article. They want hits, because hits determine advertising rates. If baiting and switching the size acceptance crew to keep them coming back… keeps them coming back, and they read the counterproductive ads, then it’s highly possible that continuing to agree to participate in this vicious cycle only keeps those who feel victimized by the whole media/body image disconnect… further entrapped.

I’m a realist. We live in a country that is based on the right to freedom of speech. The very freedom I have to write this blog post is the same one the magazine publishers have. They really don’t care about my self-esteem, or your self-esteem, at all. They care about keeping their stockholders happy. Getting people to visit your website, regardless of how you make it happen, to keep advertisers happy, to keep ad rates up, to create the bottom line that keeps those stockholders happy… is all that matters to any media entity.

So while I applaud the efforts of my friends who work in size acceptance, I have come to believe that the approach they’ve been taking is quite possibly having the opposite effect.

That is why, several years ago, I dropped out of the eating disorder conference circuit. I stopped participating in the dialogue. I kept hearing the same old dialogue, over and over and over, but it always stopped with “dialogue”. No action plans were coming out of that dialogue, no progress was made in the success rates for treating ANY eating disorder… it just wasn’t making a difference. I wanted to make a genuine difference.

What the women advocating for size acceptance want, those creating the dialogue want… is validation. And they seem to desperately want it from an industry, that quite realistically, doesn’t care about validation. Quite the opposite. They want women to feel BADLY about themselves. Because if they were quite satisfied with their looks, they would not respond to any of the advertisements that keep THEIR stockholders happy, which wouldn’t line the pockets of the companies producing the products who also have stockholders to answer to.

One side of the issue wants dialogue and validation, the other wants money. That is never going to change.

So when I dropped out of the dialogue and went on to create this inCYST network, what I envisioned was that we would create a warm, safe, nourishing community where we could learn to be healthy. We wouldn’t stomp and scream and hold our breath and not do anything for ourselves until the world was perfect, we’d create a perfect world for ourselves. That is why, for the most part, on this blog, even though the majority of the audience we work with has body image issues, history of an eating disorder, and/or weight issues, we don’t really talk about it very much. Talking about it only focuses you on the feeling that you’re being victimized. We’d rather empower you out of that tree.

I care very much about how each and every one of you feels about yourself. But I am not interested in dialogue that focuses you on what someone else is or is not doing. I don’t want to talk about the thing you’re trying to evolve away from. I want to know what you’ve done today. To manage your stress. To eat more folate. To delegate. To move your body.

Let’s imagine for a moment that when we wake up tomorrow, overnight I was given a superpower that allowed me to reinvent the entire media industry. Internet, Facebook, television, Twitter, newspapers, magazines… everything And let’s imagine that I used that super power to reinvent all of those things so that the only messages that could be communicated, anywhere, were positive, nurturing, and reinforcing.

Would you be able to live in that world? Would you be able to have a conversation with someone if you couldn’t talk about body image? If you weren’t spending significant amounts of time reading destructive magazines, following unproductive Twitter personalities, having dialogue about what’s wrong with the world? Would you be able to fill your day with self-nurturing activities? Would you eat better? Would you be happier?

Or would you be totally at a loss for what to do with yourself?

I don’t have that super power, but I aspire to create that kind of world. Last week I sent a thank you note to someone who made a purchase out of our new eMarket. She thanked us for having a place for her to shop where she felt heard and validated. And she also gave me a long list of suggestions for things we could do to expand on that world. I was happy to be able to ask her to “hold that thought” because most of those ideas were already on the drawing board.

I actually don’t want to have that kind of superpower. Because that wouldn’t be very empowering to YOU. I want YOU to take action. To stop looking at those magazines in the grocery store. To stop walking past the healthy salad bar and walking into the fried chicken joint. I want inCYST to be an underground of sorts, of women who have decided they don’t have to be victims anymore.

And who understand that one of the most powerful ways to speak, is with their wallets. If you’re not buying the magazines, not clicking on the websites, you are having a much greater effect on those media corporations than you are with dialogue.

I hope you choose to patronize the companies offering products in our eMarket, because if we can help these companies with great ideas as well as integrity to succeed, they are validated financially and can have the opportunity to become advertisers with power who actually have some influence over the media.

And the bottom line is, I want us to use our community to learn how to live in a world whether or not the media influences do exist. They only have a negative influence on you if you allow them to, and clicking on links and buying magazines opens the door to that path. Not going there is going to mean being more introspective, and talking about things like what you think how you feel, what you aspire to… what your talents are, what action you’re going to take… but for me, that is the dialogue that inspires me.

That world can exist right here, you know. Which is why I don’t participate in the dialogue about media. There are only so many hours in the day and any minute I spend on a fruit less effort is a moment that I’ve wasted because I didn’t use it focusing on YOU and who you are and how we can make inCYST world a place thtat celebrates who you are.

I know it sounds a little weird to some of you who are used to identifying yourself or introducing yourself as afat person or a former fat person or an infertile person,… or other limiting labels. I want to challenge you to, every day, if even for 15 minutes to start with, see how it feels to stop using labels to define yourself. Labels that keep you in a position of disempowerment. Labels that keep you stuck right where all those media companies want you. You might be surprised at how limiting your current labels actually turn out to be.

I want to create a new world and a new econmy with you, supported by health professionals and companies who see your beauty and your talent and who really would like to do business with you. Of course, they have stockholders too. But when they can go back to those stockholders and report that they succeeded with a product that was hard to get on the market because they took a risk on a product they were told didn’t have broad enough appeal… they teach those stockholders to seek out other small companies with big visions.

It’s a trickle up effect. I can offer you options, but it starts with you. And your decision to not focus on what the “bad” guys are doing, but to find those good guys who can help you feel good about yourself.

It’s still dialogue, it’s just dialogue with action plans attached. And from what I can see with who’s buying in our store and the energy it’s creating, it confirms to me that my better action here is to not talk about body image and self-esteem. But rather to encourage those very things with actions.

If you are a solution-focused person ready to take action, inCYST is designed for you. If you're into dialogue it may not be a great fit. If the dialoguing eventually moves you to a place where you're ready to take action…come join our fan page, come to a fundraiser, come to a class at our new office in Santa Monica, work with one of our network members to create change in your life, or simply read our posts and try a suggestion from time to time.

We like to think if you hang around us long enough, you'll start to feel like hanging out on the same old site with the same old ads and articles, Tweeting the same thoughts to the same people, is going to feel a lot less rewarding than what we have going on here. Our network stretches from New Hampshire to Florida to San Francisco to Seattle. Wherever we are, we're pretty great and we have a lot of fun. We look forward to seeing you somewhere, sometime soon. No magazines allowed.: )

I know you readers. The surest way to get you thinking about something…is to bring it up in conversation and then tell you not to think about it.

That personality characteristic is why infertility drives you so crazy…why you spend hours on the Internet looking for more information, getting excited about a new piece of information then driving yourself crazy for several more hours researching that piece of information, blogging about it, Facebooking about it, Tweeting about it. It can consume you.

So even though I don't agree with diets, I don't talk about them because it reinforces the cognitive paths through which that obsessive thinking is carved. I'd rather build new, healthy paths of thinking and encourage them to grow, while neurological"weeds" grow in and crowd out the viability of the old ways of obsessing and thinking. I aspire to make this new way of thinking so rewarding that it's easy to look back at the old thoughts and obsessions, identify them as"brain spam" and click your brain's"delete" button before they even have a chance to have your attention.

The problem I have is that today is International No Diet Day. I love the concept and believe in the message, but promoting it goes totally against the grain of how I choose to fight the problem. In order to promote it I have to make you think about dieting…or maybe not dieting…or maybe a little bit of both.

So instead, I'm going to tell you, this one time only, ever, on this blog, if you haven't figured it out already, we're not about dieting. We're about valuing ourselves and the planet enough to make choices that benefit both. Making food choices that fuel us without depleting the planet, choosing a bedtime that allows for adequate sleep, moving because it feels good, and not stressing or obsessing about things that keep us stuck.

Please remember our blog as a place to come when so much talk about what you're trying to get away from is starting to feel like a force stronger than gravity, pulling you exactly toward that unwanted destination.

So before we get stuck in that place where we don't want to be but sometimes get so caught up in talking so much about where we don't want to be that we keep ourselves right there…

…I'm going to wish you a happy May 6th and invite you to do something for yourself that promotes feeling really, really good about yourself.

Me? I had some delicious strawberries for breakfast, put some luscious coconut oil on my skin, shared a funny joke with friends, and scheduled my day to end early enough that I can attend an art opening of a friend.

No time for thinking or talking about places I don't want to be.

Here's to you having an equally nurturing day as well.